Why I started Legetty
Over 20 years in the financial industry, five kids, and two expenses that turned out to be the same problem.
Two expenses, arriving at the same time
I have been in the financial industry for over 20 years. More importantly, I am a father of five. Like a lot of parents, we took our first kid to kindergarten and came home with a 529 brochure. I opened accounts for all of them and told my clients to do the same.
As the kids got older I watched the cost of college climb faster than wages. My income grew and so did my tax bill. College and taxes were the two largest expenses of my life, and I was treating them as separate problems.
The year I stopped looking for free money
My first instinct was the same as everyone's: find a way to make college cost less. Some of my kids were what I would call exceptionally gifted. Some were gifted in other ways.
Then my income went up and I ran into the wall that ends that plan. Income is the largest input in the aid formula. I was going to pay full price, five times over.
That is the whole turn. I stopped asking how to make the bill smaller and started asking how families with real money handle a large expense without damaging everything else they own. How you pay for college is ten times more important than how much you pay.
Wondering how this applies to your family?
Book a free strategy callWhat I went looking for
I became obsessed with how financially successful families invest for retirement and pay for large expenses while reducing what they owe in tax. I had been treating college, taxes and retirement as three separate problems. They are not separate.
Underneath all of it was one principle I had never been taught in twenty years of being licensed to give financial advice. Compound growth does its work over time, and most of us are trained to save and then spend, which stops it. Wealthy families more often keep the asset and borrow against it.
I wrote a book about that in 2018 and called it The Retirement Scholarship Strategy. It is the same argument the fourth strategy on this site is built on.
Who, not how
Then I hit the obvious wall. I was running a business and raising five kids, and I was not going to become a real estate and tax expert on the side. I did not have time to figure it out, and neither did my clients.
A friend told me about the book Who Not How, about building a team of people who already know a thing instead of trying to learn every thing yourself. So I built one: specialists across college funding, tax planning, real estate and wealth planning.
Where the name comes from
My goal as a parent is to leave a legacy in three ways.
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The education they want
Helping my kids get the education they want, which leads to work they find worth doing, without it costing them or me the rest of our financial lives.
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The principles behind it
Teaching them the financial principles they will not be taught at college, so they can use them in their own lives rather than relearning them at fifty.
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Something that outlasts me
Building wealth that is still there after I am gone, and that keeps producing rather than being spent down.
Legetty is named after that word. Legacy.
Lance Morgan, founder
All four strategies
Each one helps on its own. Combined, the savings from one pay for the next.
- Tax scholarshipsTurn part of the annual tax bill into assets you own.
- Student and financial positioningLower what college costs by positioning the student and the assets.
- Scholarship housesProperty that produces deductions and cash flow, run for you.
- Leave a legacyPay for college without interrupting your own compounding.
Book a free strategy call
Tell us about your family, your income, and when the first tuition bill lands. We will walk through which of the four strategies apply to you, and what putting them in place would involve.